‘A fundamental and fascinating crisis in literature is now at hand.’ This is how Stéphane Mallarmé's Oxford lecture, ‘Crisis in Poetry’, began in 1894. Walter Benjamin too writes of a sense of ‘the approaching crisis of lyric poetry’ in the final third of the nineteenth century. T. E. Hulme's 1908 ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ identifies in the late nineteenth century an end to the age of the Romantic lyric, and a remaking of poetry. It is easy simply to equate this ‘lyric crisis’ with the ‘remaking’ of poetry in early twentieth-century literary modernism: a process that abandoned traditional verse forms, but also embraced modernity in its use of vernacular language (a process of modernisation owing much to Wordsworth, of course), its imagistic techniques, and its urban subject matters. But the poetry published in the later decades of the nineteenth century – the period identified by all three writers as the temporal location for the crisis they describe – did not, for the most part, look ‘modernist’ (particularly in terms of its form), so how was it engaging with the pressures these writers describe? Indeed, was it engaged at all? The causes and effects of the lyric crisis identified by turn-of-the-century commentators are various, but all see a problem in the purpose or relevance of the lyric genre in relation to the new contexts that resulted from a process of rapid industrialisation across the previous hundred or so years. It is the awareness of, and response to, this problem within what can broadly be characterised as ‘aestheticist’ poetry of the last third of the nineteenth century that is my object of study.

Scholarly histories of the modern formation of the lyric genre have often ignored or dismissed the last few decades of the nineteenth century, seeing this as a period of nostalgic indulgence in a conception of poetry already irrelevant to the modern world. A Pre- Raphaelite interest in the myths of the past and the paintings of the Renaissance; Swinburne's giving voice to Sappho and Catullus; the Parnassian revival of medieval French forms; the Decadent ‘gem-like’ forms: these have all appeared to seek a retreat from the urbanised, industrialised and commodified world in which poets found themselves.